Hebridean caves of the ‘45
We go in search of the hidden refuges of high-profile Jacobites in the frenzied months following the battle of Culloden, focusing on Prince Charles Edward Stuart and a priest named James Grant
In the frenzied months after their defeat at Culloden, several high-profile Jacobites were obliged to make use of the extensive cave networks of the Hebrides in order to avoid capture. Focusing on the well-known experiences of Prince Charles himself, and on the less high-profile case of the priest James Grant, Alasdair Roberts goes in search of these hidden refuges
During his five months as a fugitive after Culloden Prince Charles Edward Stuart found shelter in a number of caves. The locations of some appear on Ordnance Survey maps, and Uamh a’ Phrionnsa (the Prince’s Cave) is clearly marked on the coast of South Uist at NS 834 313. The glen of Coradale faces the Minch which divides mainland Scotland from the Western Isles, and the Prince spent three weeks there in the summer of 1746. He had been taken to Lewis by his Hebridean pilot Donald MacLeod but failed to find a ship for the continent. Back in Uist he looked out in daily hope of a French rescue vessel, but the ships which sailed by were those of the Royal Navy.
Meanwhile, Coradale was a safe refuge in a remote area – sheltered by Ben Coradale between the even higher eminences of Hecla and Ben More. There the royal visitor was to be well supplied with food, drink and clothing by the captain of Clanranald and his lady. Coradale was very different from Clanranald’s earlier protection on Benbecula. The chieftain had met the prince at a fisherman’s shelter but offered no real comfort. John O’Sullivan went on to describe a shieling hut where the fugitives spent three days: ‘There was such a large stone over the door yt we cou’d not get off without distroying the whole, we were then oblidged to dig underneath, yt the Prince may get in on his knees’. O’Sullivan’s narrative was put into book form by Alastair and Henrietta Tayler.
Shelter at Coradale
With Bonnie Prince Charlie a legendary figure in Scottish history, tradition sometimes differs from fact. Cave stories are especially liable to distortion. Napoleon’s Marshal MacDonald came in search of his roots in 1825 and was taken to Coradale by boat:
We are frightened by the road we have to take to reach the caves.There are two of them at that place, which the Prince occupied alternately.The countrymen know all the details and circumstances perfectly, through tradition.
The entrance to the first cave was ‘a recess where five or six persons may lie down and, bending a little, one may stand there’. Ordnance Survey measure the cave at 1.6 metres high, 3 deep and 3.4 wide. ‘When the Prince was there with my father and, I believe, two companions the entrance was closed by blocks of grass-covered rocks clad with moss’. The French MacDonald stayed ten minutes before taking away stones, and more of these souvenirs were brought to him from the other cave. A sentimental man, he had also taken earth from his father’s birth-place at Howbeg on the west side of the island.
Neil MacEachen was father to the French commander. The last act in an all too familiar drama has him in charge of the boat which took Flora MacDonald and the prince – dressed as Betty Burke – over the sea to Skye. Neil compiled a record after leading Charles and his companions – O’Sullivan, Felix O’Neil, the priest Allan MacDonald and Ned Burke the prince’s servant – between high hills to Coradale.Walter Biggar Blaikie, who added footnotes to Neil’s account and wrote up the Itinerary in a separate volume, stressed that there was ‘no mention of a cave in the contemporary accounts’. Local and naval knowledge were later combined for Summer Hunting a Prince. The
authors Alasdair Maclean and John S. Gibson made no mention of the Coradale cave.
Clanranald’s house at Nunton in Benebecula was considered too public for the prince’s safety and ‘it was determined the Forrest house in Glen Coridale should be prepared for his use’. Neil MacEachen recorded the royal arrival: ‘He seemed extraordinarily well pleased with the house, which he swore look’t like a palace in comparison with the abominable hole they had lately left’. The cave itself may have been where ‘Neil left him under a rock while he went in to see if there were no strangers there.’
Indoors there was ‘a seat of green turf that was made up for him’, and his bedding was heather and rushes. From another account we learn that ‘two cow-hides were placed upon four sticks to prevent the rain falling on him when asleep’. Thatch had not been well repaired. It is believed that the structure, of which no trace remains, was on the lower slopes of a’ Chas bho Dheas, the southern spur. Donald MacLeod returned from a fortnight’s mission to the mainland with two ankers of brandy ‘at a guinea each’, of which the prince drank ‘a whole bottle a day without being in the least concerned’. This was an interlude of ease. MacEachen’s account continues: ‘He took a vast delight, when it was a good day, to sit upon a stone that was before the door of the house with his face turned towards the sun’. In this sheltered corner of the island the prince was able to shoot birds without risk, and he caught fish in the bay.
Caves after Coradale
Then word came of the government’s Skye militia landing in Barra and of regular forces arriving in Lewis and Harris. Searching troops approached Coradale from north and south. With four companions, Charles went by boat to the island of Wiay between South Uist and Benbecula. A visit was also made to Rossinish, his point of arrival. Lady Clanranald met them with news and supplies, her husband having prudently removed himself from the scene. Hardship returned for the prince: ‘While he stayed upon the island he went about the shore once or twice a day to see if he could find out the most commodious hole or cave for hiding’. Another source had him ‘in the centre of the island in the wildest caves’. O’Sullivan described his master ‘crouched like a lizard, flattened into a crevice’.
Meanwhile Clanranald’s halfbrother Alexander MacDonald of Boisdale had been considering ways of getting the royal fugitive back to mainland Scotland where French ships were more likely to call. The party sailed south.Threatened by British men-of-war and overtaken by a storm, they sheltered behind Uisinis Point and landed at Acarsaid
Fhalaich, the hidden harbour. O’Sullivan again: ‘The Prince lay that night in a clift of the rock, drawing his bonnet over his eyes...’ After pauses at Coradale, the mouth of Loch Eynort and the island of Stuley, the fugitives learned that their protector Boisdale had been taken aboard the sloop Baltimore. He was then placed under arrest by Captain Caroline Scott who had arrived on the Tryal.The prince and his supporters spent a night in Calvay island’s ruined tower (or dun) at the mouth of Loch Boisdale. During a confused week of growing naval presence and continual rain, they sheltered under their sails on the south side of the loch before seeking greater security in hill country to the north.
Boisdale’s house at Kilbride was now under military control, his wife and daughters interrogated. The area north of the loch is dominated by the high hills of Beinn Ruigh Choinnich and Truirebheinn, and O’Sullivan’s account mentions two caves. He received a royal request for food: ‘If yu have time or can get some bread beaked, send me a little to the cave’. O’Sullivan forwarded ‘four caiks with a bit of bouild mutton to the Prince yt was in his cave’. Next day word reached the supplier from ‘another cave yt he lay in that night’.
Martin Margulies, regular reviewer for History Scotland, drew attention to one of them in his book on hill walks in Uist. From Coire na Cuilce (corrie of the reeds) he had looked up in awe at the northeast rock face and the mouth of a spectacular cave:
In its recesses, so local legend goes, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, Neil MacEachen of Tobha Beag (Howbeg) and Captain Felix O’Neil of the Irish Brigade had first met to plan the Great Escape... It is difficult to reach: you must either scramble up to it almost vertically, using handholds and footholds to avoid falling several yards to the ground, or creep along a narrow ledge to the right of the entrance.
Martin chose the ledge. He measured a depth of 20 metres
before passing on (with some relief) to open hill and glen.
There is more to that meeting above the corrie than local legend. The next stage of the escape saw O’Neil introducing the prince to Flora MacDonald in a shieling house at Unasary, halfway up the island near the head of Loch Eynort. Her stepfather Hugh MacDonald commanded one of Sir Alexander MacDonald’s militia companies.
The Skye men had been expected to come out as Jacobites, and Captain MacDonald favoured the royal Stuart. He obtained a passport which allowed Flora to sail with a female servant, but days followed of more rain and sheltering under rocks. Princely ill temper turned to panic, according to Neil MacEachen. His account of royal desolation added ‘a swarm of mitches’. A point worth correcting about the famous crossing to Skye is that the party rowed out in calm seas under a concealing mist. A romantic Victorian called Harold Boulton confused it with the earlier crossing from Arisaig: ‘Loud the wind howls, loud the waves roar, thunderclaps rend the air’.
Priest in hiding
Hebridean caves served to conceal a less eminent person – a priest called James Grant who later became a bishop to Scotland’s hidden Catholics. Penal laws bore down on lowland and highland Catholics alike, and never more so than in the aftermath of Jacobite rebellion. Grant was a lowlander, his father a farmer at Wester Boggs in the ‘papistical’ Enzie district near Speymouth. As a Grant, however, he was close to highland Banffshire and a bilingual Gaelic-speaker. After attending the Scalan seminary in Glenlivet, he proceeded to the Scots College in Rome where he was ordained. Grant’s abilities then singled him out for a further year of preparation with the Sulpicians in Paris. He was about the same age as Charles Edward Stuart.
James Grant’s first posting was to Lochaber where he assisted the Reverend John MacDonald. The mother of this Maighstir Iain Mor was a Keppoch MacDonald from Bohuntin in Glenroy. His father descended from a cadet of Clanranald. According to the Fort Augustus Benedictine Odo Blundell, the Braes of Lochaber presented a great challenge to clergymen but ‘Mr Macdonald, by his indomitable perseverance, combined with apostolic zeal and great piety, so far triumphed in the end that he succeeded in softening the wild and fierce temper of many of its people’.
He must have influenced James Grant, who took over Barra from the last Irish Franciscan in 1736.
There are two widely separated Hebridean caves associated with Grant – one is in Uist near Coradale and the other on Mingulay south of Barra. Clergy lists show him responsible for Barra and part of Uist in his first two years, with Alexander Forrester sharing duties for the larger island. Forrester left for Lochaber in 1739, leaving Grant responsible for all of Uist. Since Uamh a’ Ghranndaich (Grant’s Cave) – is north of Coradale at NF 840 334 it may be presumed that Forrester’s main pastoral activity had been in the south. By the time the troubles of the ’45 broke out he was back in Uist and Grant in Barra.
On the same rugged hillside below Uamh a’ Ghranndaich lie the remains of a site which may date back to the second millennium BC.
A segmented iron age wheelhouse is adjacent to several souterrains, and also a ‘humble cave’ identified as Uamh Ìosal. The ancient walled chambers may have been occupied by hunter-gatherers before farming began: a nearby hut-circle was probably added in medieval times. Archaeologists concerned with sea-threatened sites in the western machair have so far paid little attention to this well preserved ruin. Grant’s Cave is less humble, with large stones near the entrance arranged to form something like a chair. Danny Rafferty, Uist representative of the Mountain Bothies Association, made a photographic record.
Another feature which supports the theme of clerical refuge is Coir’ an t-Sagairt (the priest’s corrie) through which Allt na Crìche (the boundary burn) flows past the cave to swell the ‘one-stream’ Abhainn
Aon-uillt. It is worth adding here that the local knowledge of the Gaelic lore collector Father Allan MacDonald supports Grant’s connection with the Uist cave. Leaving that refuge, as it would seem, James Grant sought greater safety south of Barra at Mingulay. He was probably not the only priest to use the cave named after him. After being arrested, Alexander Forrester defied a banishing order by returning to Uist and (in Blundell’s words) ‘absconded amongst the hills.’
Capture at Mingulay
An account of James Grant’s capture appears in Catholic biography alongside other bishops:
Early in the spring of 1746 ships of war came to the coast and landed some men who threatened they would lay desolate the whole island if the priest was not delivered up to them. Mr Grant, being informed of these threats in a safe retreat in which he was in a little island, surrendered himself and was carried prisoner to Mingarry castle on the western coast,
where he was detained for some weeks.
A harsher account emerges from local sources. Father Allan MacDonald, whose studies of Gaelic lore and language were recognised during his last years as priest of Eriskay, went to Mingulay in June 1898 to open the island’s chapel. He returned in August with others, including Ada Goodrich Freer. She has been much criticised for Outer Isles, a book which often implies that Father Allan’s hard-won knowledge was her own. Lacking Gaelic, she misled readers by saying that the oldest Mingulay resident’s story could ‘be but inadequately reproduced in English.’ The reproduction was Father Allan’s, describing Grant’s journey down through the Western Isles:
It was at nightfall that he set sail, and when he got toVatersay he went ashore to enquire news and heard that the red soldiers were in Barra, so he returned to Mingulay and went to the cave of Hoisp.
This is near the end of the cliffbound peninsula of Dun Mingulay, as described in Ben Buxton’s excellent book. Only Barra Head, otherwise the island of Berneray, lies between this cave and the open sea. When asked for a meaning, Norse expert Richard Cox of Skye’s
Gaelic College suggested ‘breaker of the promontory’ for Hoisp or Hohispo. Eriskay’s priest had been there before: ‘On one occasion I strove to reach this historical cave, but when I approached within a few yards of it I had to retire through giddiness. It overlooks the narrow channel between Mingulay and Dun Briste in Berneray’.
Edinburgh University has this on record. The island’s oldest resident went on:
The red soldiers came to Mingulay, and the first two men they met were put under oath at the point of the sword.The first man said he had seen the priest leaving the island the day before, and the second said he had seen him come back and go over the hill.The soldiers struck the first man on the face with their muskets, and his nose was crooked till the day of his death. The other man they took with them and they got the priest, and he was bound and brought down to the village and thrown into a barn...Two young lads came in, one after another where he was, and he asked the first to bring him some thatch to put under him as the ground was very wet; and the lad went out but was unable to return.
The red-coat soldiers were in Guise’s 6th regiment of foot. Another local witness described the ruthless Captain Caroline Scott in terms familiar to the islanders gathered round:
There was about this time a soldier who had been in the ’45 who belonged to Mingulay. He was great-uncle’s son to Iain yonder, the son of Hamish, and he had some money and the soldiers were coming after him. His brother advised him to put away the money in case of what might happen... However he was surrounded by soldiers and Captain Scott ordered him to be shot, and he was robbed and murdered at the back of the house where the stackyard is... [Scott’s] superior officer, on coming to Mingulay, was shocked to hear of his brutality and said that if he had been there it was Scott himself would have been shot.
Other reports confirm that MajorGeneral John Campbell found Scott much too severe.
James Grant was no Jacobite extremist: ‘The most ample testimonials were given by the minister and other Protestants of Barra of his peaceable and inoffensive demeanour during the time of the insurrection.’ The harsh treatment meted out to him after Mingarry, however, is revealed in Catholic records:
He was then conveyed to Inverness and thrown into the common prison, where there were about forty prisoners in the same room with him. Here he was for several weeks chained by the leg to Mr McMahon, an Irish officer in the service of Spain who had come over to be of use to the Prince. In this condition they could not in the night time turn from one side to the other without the one passing over the other.
In these foul conditions another priest died. He was the Jesuit Alexander Gordon, chaplain to the men of Glengairn who came to Culloden from the Braes of Mar. Inverness became a centre of government repression:
The people of the town, out of humanity, furnished them with some little conveniences and, among other things, gave to each a bottle which they hung out at the window in the morning and got filled by charitable people with fresh water. But one morning the sentinels accused the prisoners to the visiting officer of having entered into a conspiracy to knock them on the head with bottles which they had procured for that purpose. Mr Grant and others pleaded the improbability of this ridiculous accusation; but they were not heard and the bottles were taken away. Mr Grant was wont to own that he felt the being deprived of his bottle more sensibly than any other thing that was done to him.
Grant’s brother John came from Wester Boggs to the Inverness tollbooth and left money to ease his ordeal. Along with others, the priest was released by the amnesty of May 1747. John Grant’s influence with leading families spared his brother from legal exile ‘upon condition that, under bail, he should present himself when called, which he never was.’ Rest from missionary work (and goat’s milk which had sustained other priests in the highlands) restored Grant to better health. He was able to take up duty at Preshome, the principal mass-centre of the lowland district near Speymouth. Later, as bishop in the old town of Edinburgh, he addressed the spiritual needs of highlanders who came there looking for work. A Gaelic chapel was opened for them.
Weakened by his highland ordeal, James Grant withdrew to Aberdeen, changing places with his coadjutor bishop (or deputy) George Hay. In the summer of 1778 the bishops of highland and lowland districts met with other senior clergy at Scalan in Glenlivet to agree the annual report to Rome. Hay told their agent that Grant’s health had seriously declined since the previous year: ‘I am afraid I shall soon be deprived of him which, I do assure you, will be a very sensible loss to me and to all the Mission’. Grant returned from Glenlivet very weak:
His friends were for some time in hopes that, as his feeble health had often before rallied, he might be permitted to remain with them at least over this winter. But it was otherwise decreed, and this excellent man expired at Aberdeen December 3 in the forty-fifth year of his priesthood and the twentyfourth of his episcopate.
Alasdair Roberts is a highland writer in retirement from Aberdeen University. He is a former editor of The Innes Review, the journal of the Scottish Catholic Historical Association.